S hortly after Daniel Reisinger’s mum died, the director found himself howling with laughter. “It was the shittest week of my life,” he explains, over a video call from his native Australia. “But I’ve also never laughed harder.
We were singing Bette Midler’s The Rose around Mum’s bed, and none of us can hold a tune to save our lives, but we were belting it out and all crying our eyes out and laughing.” Finding the funny side of grief may still be considered taboo by some, but Reisinger is hoping to change that with his new film, And Mrs. It stars Aisling Bea and Colin Hanks as Gemma and Nathan, a betrothed couple whose big day is thwarted when Nathan dies suddenly just before it.
Gemma decides to press on with the wedding regardless, determined to marry her deceased partner (an act known as necrogamy). The film is especially personal for Reisinger, who was preparing for the film’s pre-production when his mum died of Covid. But he soon realised he wasn’t alone in his grief.
Bea’s father had died from suicide when she was a child, Hanks lost his mother in his early 20s and Billie Lourd, who plays Nathan’s wayward sister, Audrey, lost her mother ( Carrie Fisher ) and her grandmother ( Debbie Reynolds ) within 48 hours of each other in 2016. As production progressed, the set became a cathartic and often joyous space in which the cast and crew got to share their stories of loss. “Death was all around the film,” says Hanks when I speak to him on a video .